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Google Businesses The Internet

'Online Poker' Googlebomb 379

Philipp Lenssen writes "The blogger community is fighting back, though in ways not everyone may like: they are Googlebombing the Wikipedia page on online poker for the phrase "online poker" to make it rank higher in search engines. "Online poker", along with "Viagra", "mortgage" and "debt", are keywords heavily represented in comment spam, which itself aims to boost the Google ranking for a particular site and phrase. The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google."
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'Online Poker' Googlebomb

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14, 2005 @07:55PM (#11939079)
    But you didn't even go to the trouble of linking the term online poker [wikipedia.org] to Wikipedia in your submission? Slashdot has some healthy pagerank, too, ya know.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      Slashdot has some healthy pagerank, too, ya know.

      i thought pagerank was just for relevant sites.
    • I think that's more of a 'trying to not get involved' act than anything else.
    • Just having the page in the same paragraph where online poker is mentioned will help a little.
    • by peculiarmethod ( 301094 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @07:58PM (#11939111) Journal

      I couldn't in all fairness let you get away with that without the opportunity to help out my fellow brothers by slashdotting these guys [gamblersanonymous.org].
    • i'm not sure i follow their logic here... lower the page ranking of the sites that should be higher because they are oft linked to from spam; by google bombing and artificially raising the wiki; which devalues googles results?

      I would think bloggers would like google:p
      • by ottothecow ( 600101 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:07PM (#11939197) Homepage
        They are fighting against the sites that are linked to by spam and thus fighting the spammers while supporting wikipedia.

        I am sure the bloggers love google and hate seeing spam have large amounts of influence on the results.

      • by Trillan ( 597339 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:08PM (#11939205) Homepage Journal
        I'm not clear why fighting spam-fuelled results is detrimental to google. Personally, I think the encyclopedia page is at least as valuable as whatever online poker service spammed the most.
        • If someone searches for online poker; they probably want to play online poker, which is what the wiki page is displacing. BUT the fact that its only 1 page that leaves 9 others on top, as the article said; would just cause the one spammer who is knocked off the front page to spam that much more; which will cause the other spammers to spam more to keep on the front page.... It just seems pointless:p Someone is laughing here
          • by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepplesNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:26PM (#11939375) Homepage Journal

            If someone searches for online poker; they probably want to play online poker

            If somebody wants to play online poker [google.com], Google won't return any Wikipedia pages in the top 10.

            which is what the wiki page is displacing.

            Not at all. Online poker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [wikipedia.org] links to seven poker sites.

            • Which brings up the point of Why?

              Just clickthrough for wikipedia and its favored poker sites?
              • Because, I presume, bloggers are tired of online poker sites using their sites as free advertising.
                • by TGK ( 262438 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @09:42PM (#11939943) Homepage Journal
                  As a bloger, let me give you an example.

                  My blog is probably the least trafficed site on the internet. Google doesn't even index the blog's sub pages as they're php and not directory roots. I basicly do news commentary. That's it.

                  I get between three and five entries comments every day from online poker spamers. They do their comments in HTML, and add H1 tags to the entire thing. Each comment consists of about 50 links ranging from online poker to places to buy viagra.

                  I write this as a hobby. I pay for it out of pocket, it makes no revenue and, as I don't sell ad space or use ad words, I never expect it to.

                  If I'm not going to use the resources I paied for to advertise why should someone else get to? This kind of behavior is inconsiderate, it's invasive, and it's really fucking annoying.

                  So yea.... I'm tired of being used as free advertising for something I'll never see a dime from.

                  • by koan_72 ( 569629 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:15AM (#11940986) Homepage
                    Add the nofollow [google.com] tag to your links in the HTML code and spammer won't benefit from their spam campaigns. Many major logs, wikis, guestbook programs have started this practice.
    • by anagama ( 611277 ) <obamaisaneocon@nothingchanged.org> on Monday March 14, 2005 @09:03PM (#11939627) Homepage
      Bloggers bug me. The caption should be understandable by blog-free geeks, not just those on the inside. A concise one sentence explanation clearly describing WHY the bloggers are doing this would make the whole thread much more useful. As it is, I had to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why bloggers were googlebombing the wiki. Please, when a reason exists for some fact, state the damn reason clearly! Example: Bloggers, frustrated by poker sites posting spam in the comments sections which follow blog entries, decided to fight back by displacing comment-spammer's rank in google searches. .... then insert the rest of the caption.

      And you who are about to say that it already says that -- it does ONLY if you approach the paragraph with that knowledge. For someone outside the blogging community - it's just confusing. Last, if you still like it as is, fine, that's why I don't read blogs. Too often they are crypitc and snooty.

      Grrrrrr. How's that for bitterness! ;-)
  • by dirvish ( 574948 ) <dirvish@foundne[ ]com ['ws.' in gap]> on Monday March 14, 2005 @07:56PM (#11939085) Homepage Journal
    Yeah, messing with bloggers might not have been the best idea...
    • A few months ago someone on efnet #math asked me about poker.... I wonder if it's the same guy.
  • I don't understand (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_skywise ( 189793 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @07:57PM (#11939094)
    Do they think that if they make the Wiki ONLINE POKER page #1 that nobody will go to the other 9 online poker page results returned by Google on the same page?

    It don' make no sense!
    • I'm feeling lucky (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14, 2005 @07:58PM (#11939104)
      It goes to #1.
      • Google did a study of how many people used that button. They found it was terribly insignificant, but important to the feel of the Google main page. I can't remember where I heard it of course, but I'm pretty sure it was linked on /.
        • That sounds familiar. I would use it more (like when going to a website I am familiar with, and know is number one, but don't want to type or don't know the whole result), but I don't want to have to move my mouse to click. I normally just hit enter, since I don't know a way in Safari to go to the I'm Feeling Lucky button.
        • Re:I'm feeling lucky (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Alan Hicks ( 660661 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:34PM (#11939434) Homepage
          Google did a study of how many people used [the "I'm Feeling Lucky"] button.

          I no that I rarely ever use it, and when I do, it's typically for something that I already know it will take me to, or for flaming.

          One example is the download page for PuTTY. I know the first link for "download putty" in Google is always the page I want, even though I can never remember the URL for that page. It's a convienent way for me to get what I need quickly.

          The second way is much more fun. When n00bs on IRC, usenet, or mailing lists ask questions that quite easily could have been answered with a google search, I typically do a quick search and see what's in the first few links. If the very first link comes up with the information, I'll flame 'em and tell them to drop "blah blah 123" into google and tell it you're feeling lucky, and not to come back again until they learn to do this always.

      • That's it?! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by the_skywise ( 189793 )
        Seems like an awful lot of work to boost that particular result...

        I gotta agree with the article... buy more text ads...
        • by Trillan ( 597339 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:12PM (#11939241) Homepage Journal

          Well, I suppose the button "I'm feeling lucky!" makes a lot more sense in the context of online poker.

          In all seriousness, some people I know have started using google IFL links on blogs rather tahn direct links. The idea is that in five years if the Captain Crunch brand changes, an I'm Feeling Lucky search for Captain Crunch will probably take you to the new page.

      • by themoodykid ( 261964 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:05PM (#11939179) Journal
        I guess if they hit the "I'm feeling lucky" and end up on the Wikipedia page, they probably aren't lucky enough to play online poker anyway.
    • by OverlordQ ( 264228 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:10PM (#11939223) Journal
      I think the first link said it about right:
      This stunt actually will increase blog spam volume for online poker in order for the spammers to compete with the wiki, also it has expanded the number of people trying to spam wiki pages and it will reinvigorate general blog spam for publicizing the fact that blog spamming still works.
    • If you want to learn about Online Poker [wikipedia.org], it is far better to learn from a reputable source. Almost everyone else out there is going to try and fleece you for a buck. Which of the other top links is not trying to get you to part with your greenbacks?

      In a deeper spiritual sense, learning gambling is like learning life itself. The Wikipedia is capable of teaching people to see the forest and the trees, so to speak. Disinterested, independant, impartial--the Wikipedia is an ideal teacher of contentious issue

      • "Disinterested, independant, impartial--the Wikipedia is an ideal teacher of contentious issues."

        Wikipedia is the ideal teacher of NON-contentious issues. When it comes to contentious, especially politicial issues, it is no more an ideal "teacher" then a Usenet political forum: fierce partisan editors engage in change-wars in Google entries of controversial subjects. The Bush and Kerry entries in the last election were a great example of this.

    • Wikipedia might offer some open source free gambling software or discuss the problems associated with gambling like addiction.
    • by Feynman ( 170746 )
      Do they think that if they make the Wiki ONLINE POKER page #1 that nobody will go to the other 9 online poker page results returned by Google on the same page?

      Funny you should ask. From Jakob Nielsen's [useit.com] Alertbox [useit.com] posted today [useit.com]:

      Finally, search creates problems for lower-literacy users...[T]hey have difficulty processing search results...As a result, [they] often simply pick the first hit on the list, even if it's not the most appropriate for their needs.

  • by tylernt ( 581794 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:00PM (#11939132)
    On one hand, it seems that "stooping" to the level of spammers seems as evil as the spamming itself.

    On the other hand, maybe this is an appropriate response -- fighting fire with fire.

    Only time will tell if the cure is worse than the disease... but at the moment, I think it's kind of cool to use the spammers' own tactics against them.
    • In this case, the page is highly relevant, and the links are being placed by website owners on their own websites, rather than spammed to comment pages and referrer logs by automated spambots. There's a big difference.
      • It might help if the Wikipedia article contained more information to reflect the critical view of online poker. As it is, it's a bit biased, just telling how and why it's become popular... but not much about why it's also become so unpopular.
    • Free advertising (Score:2, Interesting)

      by CRepetski ( 824321 )
      Does anyone else see this as free advertising for the 9 other sites that Google returns?

      Stupid.

    • There was a circle of people standing around a man borne up onto a pile of ground, and tied to a stake. The circled crowded the man, yelling insults and spitting in his direction. Just as the first person in the crowd picked up a stone to throw it, a hand siezed his wrist from out of nowhere.

      It was Jesus. Jesus said "let he who is without sin throw the first stone." Everyone in the circle looked down, and the man on the stake looked hopeful . Slowly but surely, all eyes fixed on Jesus, who realized that
  • Wikipedia's slow as a turd as it is. Thanks guys!
  • Pointless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Superfreaker ( 581067 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:01PM (#11939141) Homepage Journal
    Google Bombing is used to get your one page higher, it doesn't do anything to the other sites' ranking except to the single site you may displace off the top 10 results.
  • Uh, why? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EvilStein ( 414640 ) <spamNO@SPAMpbp.net> on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:01PM (#11939142)
    Yes, I read the article. This seems to be a "fight fire with fire" solution and is probably just going to make things worse.

    The stupid online poker comment spam *is* annoying, yes, but is Googlebombing Wikipedia really a viable solution?

    The Wiki didn't come up 3rd when I looked a few minutes ago (it was 5th) and doesn't Google specifically say "Don't do stuff like this!" in their help documentation?
    I hope this doesn't backfire.
    • Re:Uh, why? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by jx100 ( 453615 )
      The difference in ranking could be due to the fact that there are different google servers around the world. Each one does its own ranking, and different servers can give different results for the same terms.
  • by mcguyver ( 589810 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:01PM (#11939149) Homepage
    I can't see this as a good thing.
    1. Blog spammers will fight back at blogs - mostly innocient people who have nothing to do with this war.
    2. Blog spam can get wikipedia in trouble by violating Google's guildelines [google.com].
    3. The recent nofollow [google.com] tag attribue will dimish the value of blog spam.
    • forgot to add:
      4. This will encourage opportunists to use blog spamming as an effective way to optimize for search engines.

      However anyone that has been paying attention to blog spam knows the nigritude ultramarine [slashdot.org] contest already exposed this hole to the masses long ago.
  • Could the slashdotting have triggered a protection against google-bombing?
  • by AdityaG ( 842691 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:02PM (#11939155) Homepage
    but how the hell does this help? The online casino people are still going to spam your blog. Just because one link out of the 31 million pages wont deter a user. There are paid ads anyways. This is a waste of time if you ask me. A better way to combat this would be to come together to maybe come up with a plugin or hack to have a 100% system against spam.
    So the online casinos would be forced to stop auto spamming people.

    Of course this trouble will never end if these companies have like little gnomes manually spamming blog/blog rings.


    • Once I installed this [estherfuldauer.com], I haven't received anymore poker spam.(you have to scroll down to the Trencaspammers plugin info). It uses a graphical code the commenter has to type in.
      • Rusty on k5 recently pointed out an interesting scam that works against captchas like this.

        Apparently spammers were putting up free porn sites, but to get the free porn you had to enter the answers to captcha prompts that were scraped from other sites. People love their porn, so this gave them thousands of valid captcha responses.

        People in these industries are evil, yet seemingly very creative.
  • Googlebombing is just a result of the problem where Google can return totally irrelevant results to a search: pages that don't even contain the phrase/words being looked for.

    A good example is a search on "to be or not to be". Even in quotes, 2 or so of the top 10 results are dross: they do not even contain the phrase. Google has some great things, like so many more results and caching, but it is annoying to have bogus results come up like this. If they, by default, actually returned only the pages that co

    • by ikkonoishi ( 674762 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @09:09PM (#11939676) Journal

      Results 1 - 10 of about 773,000 for "to be or not to be". . (0.14 seconds)

      Shakespeare - To be, or not to be: that is the question... William Shakespeare - To be, or not to be (from Hamlet 3/1). To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The ...
      www.artofeurope.com/shakespeare/sha8.htm - 3k - Cached - Similar pages

      To BE or Not to BE, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love ...All you ever wanted to know about barium enemas but were afraid to ask from the webisite for adults, married adults that is.
      marriedadults.com/bariumenema.php - 12k - Cached - Similar pages

      To Be or Not to Be (1942)To Be or Not to Be - Cast, Crew, Reviews, Plot Summary, Comments, Discussion, Taglines, Trailers, Posters, Photos, Showtimes, Link to Official Site, ...
      www.imdb.com/title/tt0035446/ - 47k - Cached - Similar pages

      Amazon.com: DVD: To Be Or Not to Be (1942)To Be Or Not to Be, Ernst Lubitsch, Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill, Stanley Ridges, Sig Ruman, Tom Dugan, ...
      www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ tg/detail/-/B0006Z2KYI?v=glance - 76k - Cached - Similar pages


      Where is the -1 Patently False moderation tag when you need it?

      The reason http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=to+be+or+not+ to+be [google.com] doesn't work is that because...

      The following words are very common and were not included in your search: to be to be. [details]
      Lowercase "or" was ignored. Try "OR" to search for either of two terms. [details]


      So all that google sees is "not"
  • Affiliate schemes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by leathered ( 780018 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:05PM (#11939181)
    The poker sites themselves are not directly to blame, however it's their affiliate programs such as this one [paradiseaffiliates.com] which encourage the spamsters.

    As you can see they can be quite lucrative. Spammers also post poker site's software to Usenet and p2p networks together with a bonus code that benefits their account, with some steady play these bonuses can be cleared in no time leaving themselves a tidy profit.
  • If the counter-bombers can counter-bomb, then the spammers can counter-counter-bomb, and so on. This sounds like nuclear war, but with keywords.

    The only problem is, the automated robots that Google et. al. use are based on rules, and those rules will ALWAYS be able to be reverse-engineered by spammers.

    Is there any way out of this?

    (And please don't just say, "Google can just hire a bunch of people to look at stuff" because that won't scale to billions of Internet pages).

    Ideas anybody?
    • "This sounds like nuclear war, but with keywords."

      And without the massive casualties, radiation burns, vomiting, hair loss, and slow, painful death from cancer or immune system failure.
    • Well, having a legit link to Wikipedia and having the comment links (and thus the spamming links) default to ref=nofollow would be a pretty workable solution.

      How would you reverse-engineer it?

    • (And please don't just say, "Google can just hire a bunch of people to look at stuff" because that won't scale to billions of Internet pages).


      Hire?
      Why not add a way for users to rate the appropriateness of the links.

      Sure it wouldn't be perfect, but you could have a human look at the top pages with a high page rank but a low user rating.

      -- Should you believe authority without question?
  • Willy on Wheels! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Willy on Wheels [wikipedia.org] is the ultimate Wikipedia vandal! [wikipedia.org]

  • Unprotected (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:08PM (#11939208)
    The Wikipedia page is currently third in Google.

    And the Wikipedia page is not protected [wikipedia.org] right now which means that the spammers or trollers can add their links directly to that page by clicking edit this page [wikipedia.org] link and their changes will be visible immediately. Wikipedia administrators can protect that page by clicking this link [wikipedia.org] and adding {{vprotected}} at the top of the article to protect it from vandalism [wikipedia.org].
  • So? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by CRepetski ( 824321 )
    Maybe I'm out of the loop - but what's the big deal?

    If I were to search for "online poker" I'd be sure to read the TITLE and the two lines or so that Google gives you from the site to figure out if it was a relevant result or not.

    If I already know what online poker is, there's no need for me to go to a wikipedia page, no matter how high it's listed. Conversely, if I'm not interested in playing, I'm not going to go to some site unless I haven't had my daily dose of cookies.

    Very few people use the "I'm fee

  • Looks like the wiki entry is already first for "online poker" [wikipedia.org].
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Wouldn't it make more sense to put up a link that would have a possible affect on the spammers' business? I would have gone for a site intended to fight gambling addiction...
  • WTF (Score:2, Funny)

    by Stalyn ( 662 )
    yo wtf does some dude sucking his own dick have to do with online poker?
    • Bravo to the trickster. Nothing like seeing hardcore porn showup when you think your clicking onto a benign page about online gambling.
    • Re:WTF (Score:2, Funny)

      When your gambling debts are high, you do what you have to do to pay them off...
    • I saw it too. Backed up and re-clicked, and it's gone. I really didn't need to see that... is Wikipedia being severly hacked? Maybe one of their servers is only serving the "autofellatio" page?

      Well anyway... you learn something new every day it seems.
  • by merreborn ( 853723 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:16PM (#11939280) Journal
    ...has appearantly linked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_poker to "autofellatio.jpg". Wikipedia was a bad choice, what with the inherent ability for *anyone* to alter the page.
  • by Noose For A Neck ( 610324 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:16PM (#11939291)
    What on earth are they thinking? That by boosting the page rank of one particular page nobody will notice the other nine pages that link to online poker sites in a Google search? They are so locked in the mentality of link whoring and otherwise abusing Google's search results that they see everything in the world as how it is related to Google. Imagine a mechanical engineer trying to design an auto transmission by putting up a page with a bunch of links to the Wikipedia entry for "Automobile transmission" and hoping Google spiders it.

    Well, no surprises here: it turns out that the vapid tools who maintain "blogs" really are as stupid as they seem.

  • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • WARNING (Score:3, Informative)

    by Nailer ( 69468 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:19PM (#11939309)
    The link is now a pciture of someonee fellating themselves.
  • by teslatug ( 543527 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:21PM (#11939324)
    Wouldn't it be better to implement the rel="nofollow" [google.com] for these links? After all, they should be trying to punish the spammers, not reward Wikipedia (which is good but doesn't help with the spam problem).
  • The current link to Online Poker in Wikipedia is redirecting me to something I'd rather never have seen.

    Here's the Google Cache [64.233.167.104] of the actual Wikipedia article (until somebody over there figures out why I was sent to an auto-fellatio site)

  • highly unethical (Score:2, Redundant)

    by j0nb0y ( 107699 )
    I think this is online poker [wikipedia.org] high unethical. online poker [wikipedia.org] It's a dirty, underhanded online poker [wikipedia.org] tactic when spammers use online poker [wikipedia.org] it, and we shouldn't online poker [wikipedia.org] stoop to their online poker [wikipedia.org] level.
  • by shanen ( 462549 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @08:36PM (#11939453) Homepage Journal
    Well, I can't help but make the obvious observation that it's another example of sad greedy bastards trying to exploit other people's good will. Dare I say "intuititively obvious to the most casual observer". The online poker page itself is nothing but a obvious scam in search of more free advertising, and it should be permanently deleted from Wikipedia. The only point of gambling is that it's a tax for being bad at math, and all the repackaging is just various disguises for the essential exploitation of very simple behaviorism. Random reinforcement is the best, and most resistant to extinction.

    Again I say "sad". I vote to delete--except that that's pointless, too. The people who want to sucker other people via online gambling are of course much more strongly motivated than people like I am. I'm just annoyed. They're dreaming of striking it rich, if only they can find enough suckers fast enough.

    Anyway, the Wikipedia deletion process was too difficult to figure out.

  • Give me a break.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SteveXE ( 641833 )
    Who really cares about this? Honestly let them mess with the search results. Dumb people shouldnt be allowed on the internet anyways and im sure after 2 seconds any average joe will figure out the wiki isnt online poker...this is being made into to big an issue.
  • by elronxenu ( 117773 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @11:10PM (#11940442) Homepage
    Link to Online Poker [whitehouse.gov] instead, you miserable failures.
  • by shogun ( 657 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @11:15PM (#11940472)
    If you really want to thwawt the link spammers, what you need to do is make sure 9 other wikipedia pages also get well linked for the phrase 'online poker', thereby meaning there are no [profitable] spammed linked on the front page of google results.. The pages 'online [wikipedia.org]' and 'poker [wikipedia.org]' would be a good start..
  • brain dead morons (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grozzie2 ( 698656 ) on Monday March 14, 2005 @11:33PM (#11940554)
    [rant on]
    Problem:- the bloggers leave pages open to the public, that anybody can modify, and they get spammed by the poker places.

    Solution:- Spam google, so that the highest ranked page on the net for 'online poker' is, you guessed it, a user modifiable page, hosted somewhere else. They have made the wikipedia page the most valuable real-estate on the net regarding the given search term, so, now it's wikipdeia's problem, that page is going to be target of constant spam/attack/redirect attempts.

    I would have thought the blog types would understand, and target a static page, where this is not a problem. No, they gotta take the problem from thier insignificant little nothing sites, and turn it into a major problem for one of the most significant sites on the internet. Way to go assholes, what a wonderful way to cause a huge amount of problems for a very valuable net resource, that's done nothing to cause problems for your precious 'blog community'.

    There is a reason that most folks find the rantings in blogspace a total waste of otherwise useful bandwidth, this is yet another good example. Only the selfish shortsighted stupidity of the blog community would come up with the idea of solving thier problem, by making a wikipedia problem instead.

    That's about as smart as an anvil folks, and it's this kind of stupidity that causes most of the world to view blogspace as wasted space. Whoever came up with the idea of google-bombing the term 'online poker' with a wikipedia page, should be taken out back and strung up. Didn't a single one of the bloggers in question have enough intelligence to figure out how big of a problem this is going to create? Now that wikipedia is in the top page, every poker spammer in the world is going to be trying to hijack that page. Are bloggers in general really this dumb ?

    [rant off]

  • by mjfgates ( 150958 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2005 @01:09AM (#11940967)
    Just think... some bastard spams your blog with links to "hotanalonlinepoker.com", so you pay Google thirty bucks to whack that site down one rank whenever the appropriate search is made.

    Okay, so i can also see the scamentologists doing a few thousand of those on their detractors [xenu.net], but... it might still be worth it.

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